JAMES BENNING–Why I Don't Quit
I never give assignments. Well, that’s a lie, but probably more true than false. I used to teach a course called “Looking and Listening.” I’d take ten or twelve students some place (an oil field in the Central Valley, the homeless area near downtown Los Angeles, a kilometer‐long hand‐dug tunnel in the Mojave foot‐hills, etc.) where they would head out on their own and practice paying attention. I never required a paper, or a work of art, or led a discussion. If there was an assignment, it was to become better observers. And that they did: afterwards their art grew in a far more subtle direction.
I think it was the best course I ever taught. But I no longer teach it, not because I don’t want to, but because of my school’s fear of lawsuits. There certainly have been great changes in America since I began teaching in 1970, but maybe the change I am feeling is due to the fact that institutions get increasingly more bureaucratic as they grow older (mine’s nearing forty)—or perhaps it is both. About two years ago my school began to require a syllabus along with a statement of purpose—just what are you going to teach? For me this seems condescending; I just don’t teach that way. My classes are about providing a creative environment that questions convention, where ideas can form spontaneously and play off one another. I am to the point of believing I can no longer exist teaching in an institution. So why don’t I quit?
I also teach “Math as Art.” In that class I demonstrate how mathematics is structured and then ask my students to make a work of art that is imagined from their experience with the class. Yes, in this class I do have an assignment, but it is purposely open-ended. Last year a young boy knitted a scarf. He took his favorite love poem and typed it into his computer. Then he hacked into the memory and found where the poem was stored as hexadecimal code (base 16). (Note: A computer really stores all of its memory in base 2, but reveals it in base 16 for more friendly human consumption.) Using the mathematics he learned in my class, he then converted the poem, one letter at a time (including the punctuation and spaces) to base 2, recreating the poem as a series of zeros and ones, the way it actually resided. Then using the zeros and ones as architecture, and because knitting is a binary function, he simply equated a knit to a zero and a purl to a one, and knitted the love poem into a scarf. When he was finished he gave it to a friend in celebration of the winter solstice. This is why I don’t quit.
Perhaps I can end with an assignment. The next time you teach a class, just sit there. Don’t say a word and see what happens. I guarantee it won’t be nothing.
